Robert Hughes: obnoxious, flawed, incomparable

Robert Hughes may well be the only art critic of the last 40 years who really
mattered.

The number of people who can project themselves as the moral and artistic conscience of their age, backed by nothing more than the strength of their personality and opinions is very few. The number who can get away with it is even fewer. Robert Hugheswas opinionated, sarcastic, occasionally boorish, frequently obnoxious – a flawed human being . Many of his judgements were patently wrong, but when it comes to looking back on the art critics of the last forty years, he may well appear the only one who mattered.

From hippy golden boy to Hogarthian curmudgeon, Hughes occupied media space like few others in art or any other field. From the hectoring glitter of his flinty little eyes to his slab-like rubicund jowls, Hughes dominated the television screen with a bullish authority that made you instantly for him or against him. His presence was sufficiently intimidating to make many take the safe option of being for him even when they weren’t precisely sure what he was saying. In latter years, walking stick perpetually in hand, he and his scornful brow seemed to expand sideways to perfectly fill the TV screen, the gerontian nemesis of all that was facile and fraudulent in contemporary art – which he did a good job of convincing you was just about everything.

The writing was all of a piece with the TV persona, an effortlessly authoritative amalgam of the vernacular and the scholarly, its plain-speaking pugnacity redolent more of the bars of his native Sydney than the salons of Paris or New York. He had a gift, enviable in a journalist, of being able to turn the most innocuous encounter into a scrap.

Yet what, beyond the vividness of his own tastes and personality, did Hughes stand for? Beside other great critics of the past century or more – the likes of Ruskin, Herbert Reid or Clement Greenberg – figures with whom he would have delighted in a being compared, he may appear to have lacked a coherent aesthetic vision or message.

In the public mind Hughes is undoubtedly best known for his 1980s television series ‘The Shock of the New’. A polemic, but brilliantly lucid extrapolation of the Modernist revolution from Impressionism up to date, it had the kind of impact on the popular audience that Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’ had a decade and a half before. More than just superb television, ‘The Shock of the New’ and its accompanying book will probably stand as the great popular work on its subject. Its title has already gone into the language as the perfect catch-all for what art was about in that critical period from 1870 to 1970.

While Hughes went on to produce authoritative works on Australia and Goya (the latter written in the aftermath of a near-fatal car crash in which he was almost certainly at fault), he came to be defined by ‘The Shock of the New’ in his own mind as well as the public’s: the great romantic proponent of the Modern, and the prime excoriator of the callow commercialism of the Post-Modern, as exemplified by those heroes of the 1990s contemporary art bubble, Koons and Hirst. While many of Hughes’s views were in essence sound, he spoke and wrote himself into something of a cul-de-sac. In later life he probably spat out too many things without fully tasting them. The fact that he could say with the authority of personal experience that Andy Warhol was a boring man with nothing to say does nothing to invalidate Warhol’s art.

The jury will be out for some time on Hughes’s significance: on whether he was much more than a superb journalist; on whether he sold himself short by becoming part of the American media landscape even as he professed to abhor it; on whether he was a kind of Richard Burton of art criticism who never quite lived up to his formidable gifts.

In the meantime, there is no one who comes remotely close to stepping into his shoes, in terms either of the sheer scale of his personality or the alpha male directness of his opinions. Hughes lived close to the art world, but he was never seduced into becoming its mouthpiece. His great strength was his quality of independence – that stemmed at least in part from roots physically remote from the Western mainstream. Hughes convinced you that he was prepared to take on the entire world and that he stood for absolutely nobody other than himself.